Thanks for posting this, Michael. I too have viewed it to the end, considered it and did a little more research.
I don’t doubt that he has done good science in his own field. But actually the way he argues in this video illustrates almost exactly what I wrote about how some (!) scientists who work in ‘exact’ fields, where results can be measured and reproduced with 100% certainty, feel or sometimes say that any science concerning larger, more complex and to some extent ‘chaotic’ systems isn’t really science at all. Certainly when it moves beyond recording what has happened in the past and ventures to predict what might or very probably will happen in the future. By the same argument, meterology isn’t a science at all, but (drumroll)... “science fiction”. Indeed, he uses one example (one!) of a prediction of a hurricane track that meteorologists didn’t get right. Yes, the weather remains a chaotic system with imponderables that still sometimes screw up predictions. But nowadays meteorologists mostly get hurricane forecasts right – remember Alabama recently? Maybe it was a secretly liberal-funded storm, otherwise it would surely have gone the way POTUS said... Sorry, couldn’t resist that, I’ll stay responsible from now on. And when it comes to a more general understanding of hurricanes, their frequency and behaviour patterns, science is generally getting ‘better’ all the time. It’s about trends, not individual events. And anecdotally, I know that the accuracy and time range of weather forecasts has hugely improved since my youth. Sometimes they still get it wrong – chaotic system! – but on average, over time, they get it right more often.
When Happer makes these extremely generalized statements about how unpredictable a huge system involving two fluids will be, the conclusion he seems to be drawing is that it is therefore impossible to make any well-founded predictions about the climate, because it’s just like weather, which scientists can’t predict either. But statistically speaking they can. Not to 100% certainty, as I wrote previously. Which for some scientists of a certain persuasion (and personality) invalidates it. Since I addressed this in my previous post, I won’t repeat it all here.
Happer, despite his scientific qualifications and achievements, has made some climate-science-related statements that are pretty off the wall. He has said that the idea of CO2 being a threat to climate stability has to be wrong because, paraphrasing but not distorting his words, CO2 can’t be a ‘pollutant’ because we all breathe out CO2 and without CO2 plants can’t grow. And hence it’s good that CO2 levels are rising. And at at times in the past, the CO2 level was much higher than it is now and life flourished on Earth. (Er, yeah, for instance during the Paleocene/Eocene transition about 56 million years ago, when the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle. Good for a future tourist industry around Hudson Bay but not good for world agriculture and for most human populations, especially ones living in coastal areas). As an established scientist, putting forward arguments of this quality, at this level, is just embarassing. Or deeply disingenuous. He also said a few years ago: “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.” This is not an ad hominen attack, it is an indication that this scientist seems to be driven by some rather unrational and personal emotional issues that seriously skew his own scientific objectiveness. I mean, each individual scientist is also just a human being, and human beings have issues (albeit some more than others). That's why, just like with hurricane track prediction, it's the big view and the consensus that matters, not individual events or anomalies.
For a point-by-point, scientifically substantiated response to Happer’s article “The Real Truth about Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change”, see
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/wp-c ... Change.pdfSo really it looks like Will Happer is pretty much, by a coincidence, the imaginary physicist I described in my theoretical example of the house built on the landslide-threatened slope. The strong consensus of climate scientists and indeed the clear majority of scientists in other disciplines say if we continue as are, we’re heading for deep shit. Not 100% certain – see above etc. etc. – but with enough high probability that failing to take action is deeply irresponsible.
Of course, one can then argue that this broad scientific consensus isn’t because of lots of scientists indepdently doing their job sloppily, but because it’s a huge CONSPIRACY (with the purpose of somehow ...... us all !!!) . A cartoon you recently posted here would seem to suggest that viewpoint, But I’m not going to go there right now, or indeed at all, I think. I’ve enjoyed writing this stuff but now I have to get back to working for money. And then a couple of weeks off. So bye for now.
PS. Thanks for the beetle, Jimmy.